Two Magazines (to which I don't subscribe)
The other day, I received an email from Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic. It was nothing personal, just a suggestion that I subscribe to the magazine. I let my subscription go when I reached the conclusion that supporting the Iraqi misadventure, as TNR does, is simply not an arguably responsible position. But I was curious to see what (as the email announced) James Wood has to say about Harold Bloom's religious writing, so I walked across the street and bought the current issue.
"The Misreader," Mr Wood's review of Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, is great fun to read. It accuses Mr Bloom of repeating himself and refusing to admit that he regards the New Testament as inferior to the Hebrew Bible because he's, after all, Jewish. "A gnostic Jew" is what Mr Bloom calls himself, and Mr Wood has a lot of fun with that, too.
In general, Bloom has never shown much awareness that, philosophically speaking, Gnosticism solves nothing - that the positing of a false God or Demiurge is quite obviously not a "solution" to the problem of evil, but merely a dualism that does no more than move the problem, so to speak, somewhere else on the board.
Mr Wood suspects that Mr Bloom is really pissed that Yahweh has withdrawn from intervening in the lives of Jews, but can only confront this dissatisfaction as an aesthetic, literary problem. Mr Wood, who is probably our best thinker on the osmosis between theology and literature, could be said to dismantle Mr Bloom's arguments were it not manifestly the case that for "argument" Mr Bloom has substituted "vatic, repetitious, imprecisely reverential...campiness." (NB: I've bent Mr Wood's syntax quite a bit with that elision, but I don't think I've lost his meaning.) Mr Bloom's The American Religion (1992) was a great bore to read, but it taught me the lay of the land, as has only become clearer in these darkening times. Americans believe in a personal, stand-alone Jesus who will forgive them anything because, hey, they're Americans and, as such, lovable. Theology has almost no place in this cult of Jesus, whose principal scriptural texts are Daniel and Revelation. Which reminds me! Ian Dunlop, writing of the Camisard uprising that disturbed Languedoc in the first decade of the eighteenth century, in his Louis XIV, remarks,
The 'scripture prophecies' gave ample space to the Book of Daniel. Daniel and Revelation are, to the ordinary mortal, the most obscure and difficult pieces of writing in the whole Bible, which can be a mystification if not a stumbling block. It is significant that the more extreme and emotional religious positions always seem to concentrate on these passages - the interpretation of which can be more than somewhat arbitrary. Notorious examples of this are the identification of the 'Scarlet Woman" with the Pope and of Babylon with the Church of Rome. It requires the resort to cryptograms which are at best unconvincing and at worst dishonest.
Harold Bloom is attracted to fundamentalism because of its "strength," although, as Mr Wood points out, this term of art is never defined. It usually has no more support than "I like this better than that."
At dinner last week, Miss G presented us with some holiday and birthday gifts that she had squirreled away and forgotten, and to these she added the current issue of Real Simple. I believe that this gift is motivated by First Aid, because my life, especially in Miss G's eyes, is real complicated. Actually, it used to be real complicated; now that I'm either reading or writing blog entries all day, it's just hectic. Real Simple does have a nice feel to it, although I was almost embarrassed to be holding it in public - it is a housewife's magazine at least to the extent that Woman's Day is a housewife's magazine. I'm pretty solid about gender identity, but even I would find it odd to see a big guy paging through ads for Lancôme and Eileen Fisher. (What would a househusband's magazine look like? Metrosexual Monthly?) The paper, anyway, seems environmentally-minded, although what would I know. Specifically, Miss G directed my attention to the cover story: "One room, one weekend: makeover ideas from $5." She wanted me to look at a way of concealing bookshelf clutter with a doodad from Ikea and some fabric panels. I confess that this idea is something that I would have found tempting a while back, when I seemed to know a lot of people who were intimidated and made genuinely uncomfortable by the presence of books. But that was in Houston. Even though I'm on the Upper East Side, books are no longer a problem.
Actually, the bookshelf treatment in Real Simple is not real simple. There are seven steps, and a second coat of paint is applied after the shelves have been wrapped in fabric. Elsewhere in the issue, however, there is a good article about packing emergency bags, which I promise to read and take seriously.
